Summary:

For a productive email communication with your assistant, you can either use Skype or you can have him write daily emails.

My assistant makes a daily Google presentation with illustrations and bullet points of all the work he does during that day and it worked out really well for me.

Start of the Interview:

Francis:

That is true. The risk is on your end. It’s more on your end and your managing skills are needed so that the money losing risk is little. So my proposition to keep that risk as little as possible is to have a clear daily communication with your assistant.

Then the risk of losing money is very small because if an assistant works 8 hours then the most you can lose is 8 hours of work where he does nothing effective until there’s the next communication exchange.

So when the initial trust has been built and the start of the work has started – hourly paid or fixed price doesn’t matter – you absolutely need daily communication. How you do it, it’s up to you. You can Skype with your assistant. You can have him write daily emails.

as an effective email communication, I prefer them on bullet point format for easy reading for me. Or, as my assistant does it right now, he makes a daily Google documents presentation with screenshots and bullet points of his questions, updates of what he works on, etc.

This is addition of checking up on your oDesk screenshots what your assistant does, will make sure that he doesn’t work for nothing for long time.

Stefan:

Yes, that’s true.

Francis:

I agree that this is an additional time investment on your end. But if you don’t do it you, as you say, risks losing hundreds of dollars.

Stefan:

Yup. But the problem is that it just takes away time. Because imagine I have a new job, let’s say, a design for a flyer. Or a cover or whatever and I don’t have a specific idea of what I want.

I just want a few proposals from a graphic designer and I’m willing to pay, let’s say, $30 for that or $40. So that could translate into 10 hours of work. Or a fixed price where I have guaranteed something in the hands at the end or I don’t have anything and I don’t have to pay.

On the other hand, if I let him make some work for 10 hours and he just gives me 15 proposals but they are all crap; I have to pay him.

Francis:

It’s true.

Stefan:

So it’s guaranteed. And most of the time as I’ve said earlier, in the past I have never had a good result in the first work batch.

Francis:

Okay.

Stefan:

I never experienced that I give him a job, the first milestone, the first assignment and that was completely perfect 100%. That has never happened to me.

Francis:

That’s also not very unrealistic.

Stefan:

Yes, it’s not. But I want that. I’m not going to pay 10 hours for $40 and not have my cover design done when I could have a fixed price for $40. And I’m only paying that $40 when the job is done. Not before.

Are you getting my point?

Francis:

Okay, That is acceptable to me. So in this specific situation where it’s a design job, I have to say I have not much experience doing designer jobs via oDesk.

In my opinion, there are specialized services for graphics design which are much more appropriate for designer jobs than oDesk.

Stefan:

They’re way more expensive.

Francis:

Yeah, not if you take into account the time training and hiring, etc. The least expensive method to find a basic graphic design which sometimes is surprisingly good quality is to use Fiverr.

Stefan:

Okay.

Francis:

Do you know this service?

Stefan:

Yeah, I know Fiverr.

Francis:

If you have Fiverr, you can invest $5 to have roughly what you want. And then you can use this in your job description to say, “Okay, I have a basic design which is like that. I want it much better.”

Having virtual assistants working for you at low costs is effective and fun. However, there are some disadvantages of outsourcing work to foreign countries. If you are aware of those outsourcing disadvantages, your business will be that much more successful.

Language barrier between you and your virtual assistant

English is the most common language a must have skill for any kind of outsourcing work.

For example, if a virtual assistant only speaks Spanish , the majority of the employers will not be able to work with him.

Outsourcing is not effective if the freelancer

can’t talk English properly

can’t express or elaborate well in English

can’t understand instructions

and can’t give proper feedback about his work.

The minimal requirement to a freelancer is that he can speak, understand and communicate in English.

Notes to Virtual Assistants having trouble with English:

If you can’t express yourself well in English, working satisfactory will be hard.

English skills still can either be learned with free materials on the internet.

Also, ask your boss to give you extremely clear instructions, so that you can learn one task at a time.

If you were to choose to outsource work to one provider today, I wish you three things:

You treat your provider with respect.

You don’t get screwed over.

You a freelancer who knows English well and is bright.

Everything else is totally optional!

Exception: If you need a specialist

If you are looking for a specialist, perhaps a programmer , you cannot start with a newbie with only English skills. For this you will just have to pay more. There is always a price of high quality.

Look for the optimal freelancer for everything else:

But if you have a specific, private task, you only need a guy or a girl who

knows English

is quick with answering

responsible

and honest

Then you can do anything.

Finding the right VA needs experience

One of the bigger disadvantages of outsourcing is that you have to learn it, just like any other skill. The tips on ideal-helper, which come from years of real-life experience from both the employer and freelancer points of view, will help you with that.

And if you want to make your life easier, be sure to choose the right outsourcing company for your needs. My choice lies with Odesk.

Outsourcing work costs you money

This is on of the disadvantages of outsourcing that goes without saying. Still, you should calculate your budget before starting to work with a freelancer. It would be frustrating for him, too, if you were to fire your assistant because you run out of funds.

Fortunately, if you know how to hire a virtual assistant at the right place, you can keep costs extremely low, down to 1$/hour.

What tasks can’t you outsource?

One of the smaller disadvantages of outsourcing is that even if you are hooked on the concept, there are things which your Indian personal assistant cannot do for you, even if he wanted to.

Physical work

A medical doctor can’t outsource the treatment of his patients.

If you are an architect, you can’t hire a virtual worker to carry stones.

If you are specialist, such as and scientist, you can’t outsource working e.g. with your expensive microscope.

You can outsource some of the above mentioned tasks if you write up a real contract to respectable outsourcing company. If you take care of all legalities set up an iron-clad NDA , you might be able to make an exception to some of the examples I listed above.

Managing your VA needs time

Before you start actually saving time by working together with your personal assistant, you need to invest some time training him and adjusting to each other.

Don’t be disillusioned if the first days you pass way more time writing emails and clarifying things when you just wanted to chill out at the beach while someone else works for you.

Here is my method to getting there faster:

Use screen recording software to show him exactly what you want. This goes way faster than writing emails and is actually better suited for training your virtual assistant.

You can’t simply fool around. You now have responsibility for your VA

When you have actually hired a person to work for you, you are in a working relationship. Take it as seriously as your employee takes the money he earns for giving his best for you, and think about some ethics in business basics.

You cannot just abuse the fact that your worker lives in a poor country and consider him a modern slave.

Having responsibility for another person, who probably is looking up to you, is one of the smaller disadvantages of outsourcing. Still, keep it in mind and never take the services of your worker for granted.

Those Outsourcing disadvantages are not much of a problem?

In reality, hiring virtual assistants is easy, fun and effective for almost everyone. Just that many people don’t even consider doing this.

The disadvantages of outsourcing listed on this page are there to help you profit the most from a freelancer when you do hire him. If you keep them in mind, as well as using your common sense, you will be fine.

Do You Know Of Other Disadvantages About Outsourcing?

If you have been involved in outsourcing or not, I am sure you’ll have an opinion.

Please share the problems you think arise when doing outsourcing or giving your work way to people on the other side of the globe.

Setting up the communication right

One of the smaller disadvantages for Employers at oDesk: the oDesk message system is not well suited for day-to-day messaging.

The solution?

Exchange emails ASAP – switch from the oDesk message system to email right away in the first message after hiring someone.

Time inefficient instructions via email

Emails are the most used medium for communication around the globe. Emails also take way too much time to read and to write.

The solution:

Write a few emails at the beginning. Then, inform your employee that you prefer sending voicemail and video instructions. Give your employee all the information needed to deal with those files. Then, gradually write less and less, but speak and record more and more.

Ask your virtual assistant to confirm what he has understood in writing, especially the first few times.

Time difference

There will be time differences when you outsource to the other end of the world. That’s expected and normal.

The solution?

Don’t wait for instant replies to your messages. Expect them only – but also latest – after 24 hours.

Inform your employee that you expect quick replies.

Cultural differences

People from the US and e.g. people from China will think very differently. Sometimes, there are big differences in cultural values.

Don’t get misunderstood over language barrier problems or differences in culture.

The solution?

Be as objective as possible. Ask your employee to confirm your instructions in his own words the first few times.

Why it is still worth it to outsource to oDesk

Even if there are disadvantages for employers at oDesk, the *advantages of outsourcing by far outweigh them. It’s just business. An employer has to learn to strategically make the right decisions for his business.

How do you define productivity as a manager?

Time spent efficiently giving your virtual assistants instructions, so that they can work towards your goal, is defined as being productive.

Time spent implementing strategies, analyzing data and giving feedback to your team for a smooth cooperation is also productive.

What is not productive is to constantly check on your statistics (be it web statistics or the Odesk screenshots of your providers), without doing anything with it. You might feel that you are being productive, but you are wasting time.

I know because I have been guilty of doing this often enough.

Have a road map

When working on a project, take the time to get a 10 000 foot view of everything. Don’t just work short-term on the next actionable step – you might end up in a dead end.

Take the time to define productivity, optimal work output, intermediate steps to your goal. Then, share them with your team of virtual assistants, if you have any.

he does not work out of desperation (e.g. the whole family is starving)

How Wikipedia defines outsourcing

“Outsourcing is the process of contracting an existing business process which an organization previously performed internally to an independent organization, where the process is purchased as a service. (…)

An outsourcing deal may also involve transfer of the employees involved to the outsourcing business partner.”

What doesn’t, for us, fall under the definition of outsourcing?

The concept of outsourcing is often connoted very negatively. People associate with it big companies firing perfectly good workers or giving them the choice to work in countries like India or China.

This is offshoring, a similar but different concept.

Outsourcing is not the magic formula for free time – it’s not that simple

What also is not (realistic) outsourcing is to think that you can hire someone from Asia – and the rest of your life organizes itself, including you becoming rich overnight.

Wake up: having an assistant on your payroll does also take time.

But you can free up your schedule by outsourcing simple, repetitive and possible boring work. If you define outsourcing as “freeing yourself up from boring and tedious tasks”, then you are well on the way to success.

Companies and Outsourcing/Offshoring

Since outsourcing and offshoring are different – what is my opinion of big companies doing “outsourcing”?

If I could address big corporations directly, I would tell them this:

Don’t fire the workers you already have. Know that you might lose your secrets to people far away, possible outside the jurisdiction of your country. There is a price to rely on foreign forces too much.

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Hey I am Francis!

Nice to meet you, I am the person behind this website! The employer of virtual assistants, website owner, chemist and optimist.

My main goal is to teach you to outsource your work to others - so that you can enjoy your new free time like this.

Do you believe in building bridges between different people based on mutual trust and respect? Do you think doing this will allow both sides to draw the maximum from each other, and reach a win win situation? Where you win, and the other person - like a virtual assistant -also wins? If you do believe this, like I do, I think we should meet :)